Border Theater

Via Kevin Drum, a great article by Jack Herrera in Texas Monthly about the US southern border and why current policies will never stop the flow of migrants:

The current border crisis is a symptom of a much deeper transformation in the U.S. and across much of the Western Hemisphere. It won’t be solved by tough-talking politicians posing next to coils of razor wire. There are greater forces at play.

One of those forces is the worsening economic and political calamity across much of Latin America and the Caribbean. Violence committed by gangs and corrupt cops in Marco’s native Honduras—and in Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, and Venezuela—has also driven tens of thousands northward. But arguably the most important factor—one too rarely considered—is the interplay of supply and demand. In 2021, as the pandemic began to ease, “We’re Hiring” signs started to appear in the windows of businesses across the U.S. Acute labor shortages hobbled entire industries, interrupting supply chains and fueling inflation. In response, a record number of workers crossed the southern border.

Many industries have slowly recovered from the COVID-era labor crisis. Economists generally agree that the surge in immigration played a huge role in that recovery. But across the country, employers still say they can’t fill vacancies, even as some have increased wages to varying degrees. “America is facing a worker shortage crisis: There are too many open jobs without people to fill them,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned in September. According to the chamber, Texas has just eighty workers for every hundred open jobs.

The deficit in construction is historic, by some measures. Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade association, reported that in 2022 the industry averaged more job openings per month than it had ever recorded. Texas building executives are speaking in apocalyptic terms about the labor shortage they’re still facing. Behind closed doors, they bluntly acknowledge that countless new projects won’t get off the ground unless they hire workers who are in the country illegally.

Of course the construction industry could raise wages and hope to recruit more of the native born, but that would not be a simple fix. They have gotten used to relying on cheap migrant labor and have been setting their prices accordingly; having to raise wages suddenly would pinch them hard when they are often tied into multi-year contracts. Also, fewer and fewer native born Americans are going into construction. I remember discussing this with my sons. My brother and I both did some construction in our youths, but none of my sons have. When I asked them about it, they waved off the idea; they simply don't regard it as work people like them do. Herrera says that across the rich nations of the world, "the children of accountants and schoolteachers don’t seem to want to lay bricks, even if laying bricks were to pay better than accounting and teaching." So for the construction industry,

Cutting off the supply of undocumented workers would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber. Far fewer homes and businesses would be built in the next few decades. It would push up the prices paid by those who buy homes and office buildings. So an inviolable relationship has developed between new construction and migrants: If you build, they will come.

Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.

The Texas economy is booming largely because of affordable housing, and new housing is being built in Texas at a remarkable rate thanks largely to the state's 1.6 million undocumented workers; one recent survey of construction sites in the state found that 50 percent of workers were undocumented.

So the measures that would really end illegal migration – nationwide eVerify, and real penalties for employers who higher the undocumented – will never be put in place, and the migrant flows will continue, despite all the sound and fury of "border theater."

NASA's Europa Clipper

NASA's Europa Clipper launched yesterday on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket; it is due to arrive at Jupiter in 2030.

The point is to search for signs of life at Jupiter's moon Europa. Europa has an icy crust that is regularly remade and smoothed over, which means there is a big ocean of water underneath it. Electromagnetic studies show that the ocean is salty. There is also plenty of energy, in the form of tidal and stresses and Jupiter's intense electromagnetic environment. So, a plausible place to look for life.

On the down side, those same electromagnetic fields would rapidly tear apart many of our key molecules, such as DNA and RNA. So Europan life would have to be quite different from ours. Which is, to me, part of the appeal: I tend to think that the first time we find alien life it will be so strange to us that we will hve trouble deciding if it is alive or not.

Europa won't drill down to that buried ocean. Instead it will repeatly fly by the moon's surface, scanning it with a variety of instruments and scooping molecules out of its extremely thin atmosphere to study. We know that Saturn's moon Enceladus sometimes erupts with great jets of water from its subsurface ocean, and while we aren't certain that happens at Europa there is some evidence for it, and NASA is hoping to observe such a plume and fly the Clipper through it.

I am not optimistic that life will be found, but I think the search is worth trying; certainly the chance is higher than on Mars. And even if we don't find life, perhaps we will learn more about these strange worlds and their vast, dark oceans.

Disaster Recovery in the Trump Era

CNN Reports:

Aid to several communities impacted by Hurricane Helene was temporarily paused in parts of North Carolina over the weekend due to reports of threats against Federal Emergency Management Agency responders, amid a backdrop of misinformation about responses to recent storms.

Some FEMA teams helping disaster survivors apply for assistance in rural North Carolina are currently working at secure disaster recovery centers in counties where federal workers are receiving threats, a FEMA spokesperson told CNN on Monday.

“For the safety of our dedicated staff and the disaster survivors we are helping, FEMA has made some operational adjustments,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Disaster Recovery Centers will continue to be open as scheduled, survivors continue to register for assistance, and we continue to help the people of North Carolina with their recovery.”

On Saturday, FEMA workers had to halt their work in Rutherford County due to reports that National Guard troops saw “armed militia” threatening the workers, according to the Washington Post, which cited an email to federal agencies helping with the response, verified by unnamed federal officials. It’s not clear if the threat was credible.

Rutherford County is southeast of the hard-hit Asheville area, and part of the mountainous region that was slammed by deadly flooding and landslides as Helene carved a path of destruction through the Southeast after making landfall in Florida last month. More than 100 people were killed in North Carolina and thousands of others were left grappling with catastrophic damage.

Some FEMA operations were also paused Sunday in Ashe County, near the borders of Tennessee and Virginia, out of an abundance of caution, Sheriff B. Phil Howell said on Facebook. This included in-person applications for aid in at least two locations “due to threats occurring in some counties,” according to the county’s emergency management office. Those locations reopened Monday, the sheriff and emergency management office announced.

Strange times. Note that I am not assuming the threats are real, just noting level of paranoia, with recovery operations trapped between people who think FEMA is the enemy and people terrified of anti-government militias.

My Favorite Books of the Century

Fiction

1. Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
2. Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
3. Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
4. Pascal Mercier, The Night Train to Lisbon
5. Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
6. Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Review to come soon)
7. Neal Stephenson, Anathem
8. Marlon James, The Book of the Night Women
9. Anna Burns, Milkman
10. Daniel Kehlman, Tyll

Non-Fiction

1. Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men
2. Charles Mann, 1491
3. Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire
4. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns
5. Robin Fleming, Britain after Rome
6. Peter Hessler, River Town
7. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus
8. J.E. Lendon, Song of Wrath
9. Louis Warren, God's Red Son
10. Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit

It makes me a little sad that there no medieval history on this list; in fact I can't remember the last work of medieval history I read that excited me.

Neal Stephenson, "Anathem"

Another review from my old web site:

Neal Stephenson, Anathem. New York: William Morrow, 2008.

The leading literary spokesman for the technogeek class is back with another very long, very interesting book. I read all 890 pages in less than two weeks, which, considering that I have five children and a job, implies a pretty high degree of focus. I think it’s great.

Anathem is set on a planet much like the earth. The 18-year-old narrator and the other main characters inhabit the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sort of monastery for mathematicians and philosophers – “saunt,” we are told, is a shortened form of “savant.” In this world the scientific elite is separated from the general population and forbidden to use computers or most other technology. Unable to do experiments, they devote themselves to “theorics,” which means mostly higher math, astronomy, and the philosophy that undergirds them. They have an elaborate ritual life and have raised their music, which is much like the chanting and singing of monks, to a high art. They grow their own food and manage their own affairs. The avout, as these mathematical monks are called, are divided into four classes, based on how frequently they interact with the secular world. The Unarians open their doors once every year, the Decenarians once every ten, the Centennarians once a century, and the Millenarians once a thousand.

The complex, 3000-year relationship between the secular and “mathic” worlds is laid out in some detail (you can give a lot of background in 890 pages). It seems that 700 years or so before our story civilization had grown wealthy and technologically advanced but destroyed itself through war and ecological disaster. Much of the blame was placed on the scientists who created the superweapons used in these wars, so they were banished to their “maths” and the separation between the two worlds was rigidly enforced. Since then the secular world has been relatively peaceful but technologically and economically stagnant, while the mathic world has gotten caught up in abstruse and unresolvable philosophical debates.

Much of Anathem moves quite slowly. The plot doesn’t really get going until page 250 or so, and after that there are more long patches in which very little happens. I kept reading because I found the world fascinating and because the characters talk about interesting things. Stephenson’s world is full of marvelous details. He has developed an extensive vocabulary that helps make the world feel different from earth despite the similarities. Data is “givens,” videos are called “speelies,” and video cameras are “speelycaptors.” The sociology is particularly interesting, such as the ways different seculars feel about the avout. Some consider the avout useless fuddy-duddies, some think they are evil sorcerers, some think they have special contact with god. I never minded that little was happening, because for me just exploring this world was enough.

The plot, once it gets going, it pretty interesting. I’m not going to say anything about it, because it relies on surprises I don’t want to spoil and because it isn’t really the main point of the book anyway. The most important section of the book, I thought, was a hundred-page-long discussion revolving around the speculation that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics explains consciousness. The plot follows out certain very far-fetched real-world consequences of this idea. I don't happen to think that this view of the wolrd is correct, but, hey, this is what science fiction is about: what might happen if this crazy but possible scientific notion were true? Stephenson shows himself to be a master of this kind of writing.

The many worlds interpretation grew out of the frustration physicists have felt when they try to connect the mathematics of particle physics to a logical narrative of what is happening in the world. Quantum physics gives no absolute account of where things are or what state they are in, just probabilities. An electron might be just about anywhere in the universe; in quantum mechanics it doesn’t have a location, just a sort of cloud of probability. Nor is this just the vagueness of a guess. In some kinds of experiments the electron seems to be smeared out in space, for example, passing simultaneously through two holes in a screen. In other cases an electron seems to be in two places at once, or to have two different spin states at the same time. But if you look for the electron, for example by bouncing an x-ray off it, it has a definite location. What happens to the probability cloud that it appeared to be a millisecond before?

Nobody knows. Textbooks say that the wave function of the electron, which describes that smeared-out probability cloud, has “collapsed” to one point. As I understand it, nobody has been able to model this collapse in a rigorous mathematical way, and physicists have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the textbook description. So they have tried some very weird ways to make sense of the quantum world. The many worlds interpretation asserts that, in fact, every possible outcome does happen. Every time someone measures the spin state of an electron or measures its exact location, the world divides into many worlds, with each possible outcome happening in one of those worlds. The many worlds interpretation has some obvious problems. First of all, it seems impossible almost by definition to ever prove that it is true or false, which according to the standard definition means that it isn’t really science. There is also the Schroedinger’s cat problem: what kind of event triggers the division of the cosmos into different “world tracks”? And what about probability? What does it mean to say that one outcome is more likely than another if, in fact, every possible outcome does happen? But for Neal Stephenson’s purposes as an author, and ours as readers, it is enough that a great many scientists find the idea intriguing.

I had never before encountered the connection between the many worlds interpretation and consciousness, but since it seems, once you hear it, rather obvious, I assume that Stephenson didn’t invent the model he proposes. (One of his characters notes that people have been speculating on these topics for a thousand years.) The idea goes something like this: one way to define consciousness is to think of it as the ability to hold different models of the future in our minds at the same time. When we think about what to do, we imagine the consequences of different actions. We also think about the past, wondering how things might be different if we had made different choices. In the terms sometimes used by physicists, we are holding in our minds separate world tracks; as some philosophers have put it, we live extended in time. Recall that it is possible for subatomic particles to be, or at least to appear to be, in two different states at the same time. Such a particle exists simultaneously in two separate world tracks. This is the property that would be taken advantage of by quantum computers, should they ever be created: a transistor that can be in two states at once can do a lot more work than one that has to be in one state or the other. What if, this speculation proceeds, our brains work that way? If we hold different models of the future in our minds using the quantum properties of electrons in our brains? Why, then we are quantum computers, and our brains are able to travel some distance along parallel world tracks, existing for at least a short time in multiple universes. This ability to exist simultaneously in parallel universes defines consciousness, or at least is a key part of it, and it makes our minds fundamentally different from ordinary computers.

Whatever you think of this model, in Stephenson’s hands it makes for some fascinating conversation among his characters and some wonderfully bizarre happenings. (Suppose there were people who learned to travel along separate world tracks for more than the microseconds that most of us can, perhaps for hours or days; might not this ability to follow out the consequences of actions until they become clear before choosing one seem like a kind of sorcery?) If you think you might like reading a novel that mixes conversations on such matters with some intense action and the exploration of a very cleverly imagined world, run out and get a copy of Anathem. If not, well, read something else.

One of the things I find most interesting about Stephenson as a writer is that he so clearly defines himself as a particular kind of person, writing for those like himself. He knows a lot about digital technology and something about math, and he looks down on those who don’t. Government comes across as a sort of conspiracy set up by those without technical knowledge to control those who do, and to take some of the wealth they create and distribute it to people who have done nothing to deserve it. Stephenson’s bestselling book so far, Cryptonomicon, features a lot of straight out anarcho-libertarian fantasy. Characters live in fortified compounds on lightly governed islands, their privacy protected from government snooping by strong cryptography, their money shielded from taxation in a completely secret international internet bank. Government agents and especially lawyers appear as irrational, power-mad goons. Brilliant codebreakers exploit the ignorance of their military bosses to carry out their own diplomatic policies, along the way making fools of those same bosses with practical jokes that the generals never even understand.

Compared to the world of Cryptonomicon, Stephenson’s new world shows some of the same tendencies, but in a more nuanced way. It seems less juvenile, less like the sort of thing dreamed up by a 20-year-old fan of Ayn Rand. Since it is presented in a more grown-up and serious way, it seems fair to treat the philosophy espoused here seriously, and to ask whether it has any value.

Stephenson puts a very high value on rational, scientific thought. In Anathem he allows some value to poetry, but in all his books he heaps abuse on religion. In one of my favorite moments in Anathem, the narrator has a discussion with a religious believer about Saunt Bly, a famous character who, centuries before, had left his math and ended up as the focus of a religious cult. The “deolater” says that he believes that Saunt Bly was expelled from the concent because he proved the existence of god. “That’s interesting,” says the narrator, “because what would really happen is that we would say ‘nice proof, Bly’ and start believing in god.” At a wedding, the deolater preacher gave “one of his exasperating sermons, filled with wisdom and upsight and human truths, fettered to a cosmographic scheme that had bee blown out of the water four thousand years ago.” It was nice to see that Stephenson has created some interesting god-believing characters who come across as generally positive, but in the end they still suffer from that silly weakness, the inability to think in a rational and rigorous way.

The secular powers get a similar treatment. Some individual politicians are educated and sensible, and individual soldiers come across as decent guys who are very useful in an emergency, but on the whole government is a deeply frivolous enterprise. The leading avout understand the world so much more profoundly than the “panjandrums” that the notion of their following secular orders is a joke. Even the 18-year-old narrator is wiser than the political class.

I have nothing against intelligence and education, and I am myself a big fan of rational, scientific thought. But that is far different from the claim that the technical elite should rule the world. Stephenson seems to think that there is nothing to government but intelligence and rationality. I was reminded of the claim, made by the King of the Brobdignacians in Gulliver’s Travels, that there is nothing to government but goodness and common sense. But it simply is not true that scientists, even the greatest, have any special wisdom when it comes to politics. George Orwell, confronted by the claim that a more scientific education would make the English better citizens, asked why, if that was so, so many scientists of the 1920s and 1930s became communists and Nazis. In fact, over the past century highly educated, philosophically minded people have been drawn to radical politics in much greater numbers than the populace at large. (Communists, racists, John Birchers, etc.)  Here’s a question to ponder: which group, scientists or ministers, has been a more important force for political good in America?

I would say that Stephenson’s own politics disprove his notion that the elite has more wisdom than the masses. Of all the competing political philosophies in the world, I think libertarianism is the stupidest. We cannot survive without government. Even Stalinism, for all its horrors, managed to work for a while. Libertarianism would never work at all. We could certainly get by with a lot less government than we have now, and I am attracted to libertarian positions on several issues. But the notion that we could get by without a strong state is simply nonsensical. Too see what would happen, you have only to look at what happened in Europe when the Roman Empire collapsed. The economy collapsed with it, the population cratered, and the survivors mostly ended up as serfs of powerful lords or great churches. Without a government stronger than the corporations, we would all end up as the serfs of corporate masters, or of individual billionaires.

Yeah, ok, it’s a novel, and I am once again indulging my habit of taking everything too seriously. But it’s Neal Stephenson’s own fault. By incorporating so much fascinating, high-level discussion of ideas into this terrific book, he has put me in a reflective, thoughtful frame of mind. How many entertaining books can do that?

October 26, 2008

Links 11 October 2024

Sculptural fragment from Notre Dame de Paris

Interesting Terry Eagleton piece about the reign of literary theory, review of a book by Frederic Jameson. What was that about, anyway? Eagleton says it was at attempt to continue through other means a radical tradition that had failed politically.

The tomb of Idi, a high official's daughter of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom.

Study finds that universal pre-K does not help children academically but it does raise their parents' income.

Painting Deng Xiaoping out of Chinese history (Twitter/X)

Spitalfields Life on The Doors of Old London.

Kevin Drum on the income level of the poorest 20% of Americans.

What one fifth-century Bavarian woman wore hanging from her belt. (Compare here)

Oliver Cromwell's pocket watch.

The oldest known example of a Scythian-style royal burial, in a mound surrounded by sacrificed horses, has now been found in Siberia, c. 800 BC. The discoverers say this proves Scythian culture originated in Siberia, but then those discoverers are Russians, and their country is at war with Ukraine where most people think the Scythians arose.

Politics and Hindu festival in Kolkata, where the murder of a female doctor has roiled the city.

Lostwave, the search for forgotten songs.

A conversation with Sally Rooney on loving the conventions of the novel. I liked this because I believe, as I have often said, that the novel is the formal expression of bourgeois life and bourgeois sentimentality and makes no sense in other cultural contexts.

Rah rah post from the president of a space firm on the great future for research and manufacturing in orbit. I don't believe it, but it might be true and if so it would be important.

2024 Epson International Pano Awards.

Construction Physics explains that port automation is complicated and it is not clear that more automation would make US ports better. Via Marginal Revolution.

Sabine Hossenfelder says using AI for coding is not working well so far, 7-minute video.

This weird little article says work will go forward on a 5th-century BC shipwreck off Sicily from which bars of orichalcum have been recovered. Ok, but what is orichalcum? This is not a simple problem. Many modern authorities think it was an alloy of copper and zinc, that is, a kind of brass, but the classical Greeks also had another word for brass, and Plato makes orichalcum out to be a particularly valuable metal, which brass is not. So other authorities think the word refers to platinum. Fortunately this much better article tells us that the metal bars from the shipwreck are "75-80% copper and 14-20% zinc, with traces of nickel, lead, and iron," which is an entirely normal composition for brass. Which makes me think the investigators just decided to call their bars "orichalcum" to get some free press coverage.

Jeffrey Lewis ("arms control wonk" on Twitter/X) says the October 1 missile attack shows that Israel cannot afford to shoot down every Iranian missile and chose to prioritize other targets over defending air bases. Israel's Arrow missiles work but they cost about $4 million each and Israel has a limited supply. (Presumably the F-35s and other highly valuable planes scrambled away from the airfields when word of the attack came, which was hours in advance.) The twelve SM-3 missiles the US fired in support represent a whole year's production of that missile; the cost of various versions is $10 to $30 million.

Ramzan Kadyrov declares blood feud (really) against three other Russian politicians.

Twitter/X post about the crash of a new, large Russian drone, a Sukhoi S-70 Okhotnik-B. Claimed as a stealth platform but US military guys say, after looking at the rivets on the fuselage, it would not be very stealthy at all. It was shot down by a Russian fighter, perhaps because control had been lost; video of the shootdown here.

Isabel Wilkerson, "The Warmth of Other Suns"

Between 1915 and 1970, about 6 million black Americans migrated out of the south to cities in the north or on the west coast. Demographers call this the Great Migration, and it was a big, powerful, and very important event. The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) is a wonderful book about it.

The Warmth of Other Suns has four interleaving elements. There is, first of all, a general narrative of the event, drawn from demographic, sociological and historical studies. That general narrative is made specific through the lives of three migrants who represent the three main flows that made up the movement: from Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas to the northeast, from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, and from Texas and Louisiana to the west coast. Ida Mae Gladney was a sharecropper's daughter who moved from Mississippi to Chicago in 1937. George Starling moved from Florida to New York City in 1943, where he found a job working on the New York to Florida trains that had carried him north along with a million others. Robert Foster was a physician who left Louisiana for Los Angeles in 1953, where he eventually became a celebrity surgeon and big-time gambler who could stay and eat free at any casino in Las Vegas; after he repaired damaged tendons in Ray Charles' hand, Charles wrote a song about a doctor named Foster stealing his girlfriend that was a big hit in 1962.

The migration began during World War I, when manufacturers, cut off from immigrant flows – migration from Europe fell by 90% during the war – and needing to ramp up production sent agents to travel through the south recruting sharecroppers to come north and work. Southern planters were so alarmed by this threat to their labor supply that they passed crazy laws against the recruiters, some imposing fines of up to $10,000 for enticing laborers to leave the state and others requiring a recruiting license that would cost up to $75,000. But word spread anyway, and half a million blacks moved north between 1916 and 1920. Many people expected that the movement would die down after the war, but instead it accelerated, and it never really slackened until after the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the mechanization of agriculture gave southern blacks hope that their lives might improve at home.

Active recruiting by northern companies only happened during the World Wars. What kept the migration going the rest of the time was ties of kin and neighborhood between folks in the south and those already set up in the north. People kept moving to wherever the first people to leave their district had ended up; one sociologist noted that every person who had gone north from one South Carolina county went to Philadelphia. One Mississippi county sent hundreds of people to Beloit, Wisconsin. People in big cities like Chicago or Los Angeles formed clubs with people from their own towns or districts, like the Monroe, Louisiana club in LA that endured into the 1990s.

To me one of the most interesting themes of the book is the relationship between individual choice and social change. Wilkerson asked many migrants, starting with her own mother, if they were aware that they were part of a major national movement. Did knowing that millions of blacks were moving to the north influence their own choices. All said no, her mother quite indignantly. To them these were personal choices made for narrow, personal reasons. For Ida Mae it was bound up with her choice of husband, which fell on a man determined to move north over another suitor who stayed in Mississippi and was still a farmer in the 1970s. In 1943 George Starling had been organizing pickers in the orange groves to demand higher wages during the wartime labor shortage when a friend tipped him off that a group of growers might be planning to have him killed. To him, there was no choice, just a flight out of the county in the dark of the night. Robert Foster had the kind of dreams that drove millions of people from small towns to the big city, dreams of hitting the big time and being somebody, with a Cadillac and flashy clothes and capital R Respect from everybody around him.

And yet they added up to a mass movement. 

How this happens is, I think, the key question of sociology. One of the causes of the Great Migration was certainly Jim Crow. Many, many people told interviewers that they went north to "breathe free" or "live like men," and plenty of others fled from assaults or threats. Sociologists think, although this has been hard to prove, that the departure rate increased whenever there was a lynching in the county. The promise of higher wages was certainly another cause.

One of the Wilkerson's themes is that the Great Migration was much like the migrations from Europe and Mexico to the US, and that migrants to the north lived through some of the same patterns as migrants from outside the US. But the migrants themselves, she discovered, hated this kind of thinking; they were Americans, and they resisted any comparison between themselves and Irish or Mexican migrants.

There is too much in The Warmth of Other Suns for any summary to do it justice. Wilkerson covers the real estate wars of the 1960s and 1970s – Ida Mae Gladney bought a house in a mostly white neighborhood of Chicago only to have all of her new white neighbors leave within a few months – the rise of drugs and crime in northern cities, the slow fading of Jim Crow barbarism in the south, and much more. The amount of research behind this book is simply staggering. Wilkerson says she interviewed 1200 people, and I believe her. Her interviews with her three main subjects must have added up to hundreds of hours; she lived with her subjects (by then all elderly), drove them to their medical appointments, met their families, attended their Thanksgiving dinners. She interviewed their friends and co-workers, went to their home towns to check on their recollections, verified every verifiable claim with newspaper stories, birth and death certificates, and whatever other records she could find.

I think the great acclaim this book has received (second on the NY Times best books of the century list) comes from the positive story it tells about the black migration. Much of this story will make black readers proud: the defiance of segregation, the determination to live free, the humanity and dignity of Wilkerson's subjects. But to me the most moving part of the book came at the end, where Wilkerson chronicles the final illnesses, deaths and funerals of the three people she had befriended. These were good deaths, people who were surrounded by friends and kin, who were members of churches where people gathered to mourn them with full ceremony. And yet they overwhelmed me with sadness. It seemed to me that in the face of death, the whole story shifted; does it matter where we live out our short times on earth? Whether we work in offices or cotton fields? Whether we can vote? I would say that it does matter, but I do not know how I would refute an argument that says it does not. The shadow of death is deep and dark, and the way decay slowly overwhelms our bodies, stripping from us one thing after another that we fought and struggled for, has an awesome and awful finality.

I give The Warmth of Other Suns my highest recommendation, but if you are uncomfortable with intimate recountings of death you might want to stop before the end.

Why Do I Have a Feeling that the Authors of This Study are Over Fifty?

Links 4 October 2024

Roman glass flask, likely made in Cologne in the 3rd century AD

The unintentional humor of the Eric Adams indictment. And Richard Hanania on the MAGA conspiracy theories that say Adams is a victim of the Deep State. On Twitter/X: "My view is corruption is bad and MAGA should stop defending it as a matter of principle."

Stem Cell Therapy Achieves First-Ever Cure for Type 2 Diabetes.

Some remarkably well-preserved Viking skeletons.

Broad-based tariffs don't necessarily help domestic manufacturers, since many American manufacturers use imported parts or materials.

Returning to college in modern America: I give you the "Hot Mom Dropoff" at Florida State University.

Kevin Drum reminds us that whatever problems young men have in America, they still earn more money than young women.

Jeremy Horpedahl goes after J.D. Vance on the price of refrigerators over the past 40 years (Twitter/X). The upshot is that fridges now cost way less in inflation-adjusted terms and use half as much electricity; the question of whether they last longer is complicated but it seems they may be a little less reliable.

Scott Sumner on greatness in art, mannerism, and opportunity: "The key is to understand the difference between artistic talent, which is not uncommon, and artistic greatness, which requires talent and a very special set of circumstances." This seems to be true, but I find the causality very mysterious. Why do artists need a certain, rare set of circumstances to create beautiful, powerful art? Why does catching the wave of a new style matter so much? Why do artists keep abandoning successful, beautiful styles in favor of the weird and ugly?

The man with 38 medieval graves in his basement.

Noah Smith explains once again that imports do not subtract from GDP. The number of people who think they know something about economics but don't grasp this simple equation is downright baffling.

What if a local government lies about a supposed "public use" when they seize land via eminent domain? Seizing black-owned land for "public parks" used to be a common dodge, although that would probably not pass judicial muster now. But what about seizing land for a "park" solely to prevent the construction of a business the mayor opposes?

Follow up to the bogus frenzy about thousands of unmarked graves at Indian schools in Canada: no human remains have been found. The eagerness of most liberals in the US and Canada to believe these lies is telling.

Contemplating a sloppy online poll that says young people are getting fired more, Kevin Drum wonders why we have no official data on firing.

Lots of new Nazca lines and figures discovered with the help of an AI system. Those people were busy.

Having attempted two different books on Edmund Burke and his thought and failed to make any headway with either, I recommend that others with an interest try this 44-minute lecture from Michael Sugrue of Princeton. In fact I recommend Sugrue on almost any western thinker; he covers about forty in lectures available on YouTube.

Complete 3D diagram of all 140,000 neurons in a fruit fly brain (NY Times, Guardian, one-minute video on YouTube, original article) Here is where I see a major role for AI in science: maybe a computer can make something of a pattern just too big and complex for a human brain to grasp.

Swedish firm makes steel at industrial scale without carbon emissions.

One of the many losses to Hurricane Helene was a monument to beloved pets. I continue to find pet-keeping to be one of humanity's weirdest evolutionary quirks.

Oz Katerji hopes Israel's weakening of Hezbollah might give the Lebanese state the chance to regain control of its own country, but doubts there is enough of Lebanon left to achieve that. (Twitter/X) And Lebanese Christians celebrating Nasrallah's death in the streets.

Longish essay on the institutional basis of Russian dictatorship.

Debating failures by western analysts at the start of the Ukraine war. Philips O'Brien and Eliot Cohen say people who thought Ukraine would fall quickly are idiots who should pay a price for their idiocy. (Atlantic article, which is free for now, and a report from the CSIS) Ok, O'Brien was right that Russia would fail to take Kyiv quickly, but on the other hand Russia has kept the war going for more than a year after he said they were "on the verge of collapse."

Crazy short video on Twitter/X of the ballistic missile engagement over Jordan on October 1.

Port Automation vs. Union Jobs

The big issues in the dockworkers strike are 1) pay and 2) automation. International Longshoremen's Association president Harold Daggett has mainly been talking about automation, which drives most economists crazy. American ports are not efficient by global standards, and we all pay a price for that. But it is true that automating American ports would eliminate thousands of jobs. Should we care?

Consider that Daggett once fumed about EZ Pass eliminating the jobs of toll booth workers:

Take EZ Pass. The first time they come out with EZ Pass, one lane, and cars were going through and everybody sitting in their car goes, ‘What's that all about, I'm going to get one of them.’ Today, all those union jobs are gone, and it's all EZ Pass. People don't realize it, everybody's got three cars, everybody got an EZ Pass on the window, and they go through like it's nothing, and they get billed in the mail. They didn't care about that union worker working in the booth. . . . Someone needs to go to Congress and say, ‘Whoa, time out,’ this world is going too fast for us. Machines have got to stop.

And for that I have zero sympathy. Sitting in lines at tool booths is awful, so E-Z Pass has improved my life. If your plan for your own future is all about imposing suffering on others, count me out.

On the other hand, let's imagine a future in which machines can do pretty much all work. What happens then?

I have no idea. So I tend to think we should be careful about these decisions.

Who bears the cost of inefficient ports? Mainly working and middle-class people, since we spend a lor more of our incomes on stuff than the rich do. American manufacturing companies also pay, since they use a lot of imported parts and materials. So this isn't a transfer from the rich to the poor, more a general tax on all of us.

I think what I would like to see here is the port workers getting a nice raise in exchange for accepting automation, but I can't manage particularly strong feelings about it.

The Lawsuit against Academic Publishers

You may have heard that a scientist, Lucida Unin, has filed an antitrust suit against six major publishers of academic journals. The core charge is that the journals have concoted an anti-competitive "scheme" that forces scholars to work for free while they pocket billions in revenue:

The suit alleges that the six academic publishers—which own 53 percent of academic journals—have been able to carry out the so-called scheme by forming a “cartel” through STM and fixing the price of peer-review services at zero. Those journals received more than $10 billion in revenue in 2023.

In so doing, the suit says, publishers “agreed to coerce scholars into providing their labor for nothing by expressly linking their unpaid labor with their ability to get their manuscripts published in the publisher defendants’ journals,” which can boost a researcher’s curriculum vitae in what the complaint characterizes as the “‘publish or perish’ world of academia.”

The suit also accuses the publishers of agreeing not to compete with one another by requiring scholars to submit their manuscripts to a single journal at a time and prohibiting them from sharing findings while their manuscripts are under peer review. That enables publishers to “behave as though the scientific advancements set forth in the manuscripts are their property,” it reads.

I think that this is undoubtedly true, but I'm not sure I blame the publishers for it. The root of the problem is the way scientists and other scholars fetishize publication in big-name journals. Because your whole career depends on those publications, you will of course do whatever it takes to place articles with those publishers, including following their anti-competitive rules and doing your part at peer review.

The solution is to forget about publishing in academic journals and evaluate scholars by the actual quality of their work. Everybody says this. A lawyer named Christopher Jon Sprigman puts it this way:

Science and knowledge are paying an enormous tax to commercial publishers for this prestige economy for which they depend on commercial publishers. If academics generally had other prestige mechanisms they could refer to—such as actually reading the articles more carefully when making tenure decisions—they wouldn’t depend so much on the publishers.

But nobody knows how to make that work. Let's say your colleague is up for tenure, but he or she is an expert in a field you know hardly anything about. How do you make your evaluation? Well, you can either spend a month of your life delving into that field in an attempt to figure our where your colleague's work fits in, or you can just check the names of the journals and the citation counts. So of course you just check the names of the journals and the citation counts.

So long as there are a dozen applicants for every academic position, and so long as we continue to judge professors by their scholarly credentials, it will be very hard to fix this. 

But empowering evil publishers is just one of the bad consequences of putting so much weight on placing articles in top journals. Worse in my mind is the huge pressure put on young scholars to get publishable results, which almost forces them to hack their work into some kind of positive discovery. The explostion of fraudulent or all-but-fraudulent work is only what I would expect from this system.

The rewards we give to people who get published in top journals, regardless of whether their work has any other merit, are a miasma of corruption that sits in the center of our scholarly world like a cancer on a vital organ. Wherever the cancer sits, it will eventually send its twisted offspring out through the body until the whole organism sickens and dies.

Thoughts on Office Life

I cleaned out my old office in Washington, DC this week.

I've had an office in Washington since 1993, so this was the end of a long saga. My old employers moved into our current space in 2010. I was in a cubicle for a few years but some time around 2013 I moved into a big double office that I shared with one of my colleagues. The space was big enough for three desks but there were only two computer connections, so we got a good deal. On the other hand, the extra space meant that we started accumulating stuff. In particular, books; all the books that anyone purchased for particular projects ended up on our shelves. (It sometimes happens that you have a project in, say, Lynchburg, and the most convenient way to get information you need is to buy a copy of a book like Lynchburg: An Architectural History.) Then my boss retired and all of his stuff descended on us, including thirty years worth of American Antiquity. Then our Richmond office closed and we got all their books. Plus all the old cameras people weren't using any more.

Then my old company was purchased by a much bigger firm, and we suddenly had a lot more offices. My old company had rather few, so (for example) all the cultural resource people in the Washington-Baltimore area were in one office. But the new company has six offices within the region, and people started going to the one closest to their homes. Around 2019 my office mate, who lives in Baltimore, started going to the office in Baltimore instead of commuting to Washington. We held onto his desk, though, because we were in the middle of hiring multiple new people, and we thought at least one would end up in Washington. None did. Then the pandemic hit and everybody went home. 

At some point we were ordered to return to the office two days a week, but when I did I immediately got Covid-19, and anyway that experiment in part-time office work ramped up very slowly. For a long time the office was completely empty on Mondays and Fridays. I never really got back into the habit of riding down to Washington, and one thing about a long commute is that is a lot easier when you rigidly make it part of your routine. Plus, with no other cultural resources folks in DC the rationale for commuting down there seemed dubious; with whom was I supposed to interact? For long stretches I had no projects working with anyone else in DC. (Instead I have projects in Orlando, New York City, Palo Alto, the Great Smokies, the Mojave Desert, and all across Virginia and North Carolina, and I have never seen most of the people working on these projects.)

I went to the office less and less; I think until this week I had been in the office twice since June. But other people have been going back, and space now is tight, and last week they asked me to surrender the large space I have been occupying alone for more than four years.

I am ambivalent about this. I don't miss commuting down to my office to turn on my computer and interact with people across the country in exactly the way I would from home. I do miss when I was part of a group of people with similar skills and interests, who worked for the same clients and often worked together on projects. That was great.

I also wonder about young people starting out. I learned an enormous amount just being around my old boss, and being together with other archaeologists and historians, and I think we have had some significant mentoring failures since our office broke up. It seems to be much easier to do things that have become routine to you via the internet than to learn to do them.

So when I think about the question of whether working together in an office is important or "worth it," my own experience compels me to ask: working together with whom, and doing what?

Porphyrion and the Fermi Paradox

Today's big news:

Astronomers announced last week that they had discovered a black hole spitting energy across 23 million light-years of intergalactic space. Two jets, shooting in opposite directions, compose the biggest lightning bolt ever seen in the sky — about 140 times as long as our own Milky Way galaxy is wide, and more than 10 times the distance from Earth to Andromeda, the nearest large spiral galaxy.

Follow-up observations with optical telescopes traced the eruption to a galaxy 7.5 billion light-years away that existed when the universe was less than half its current age of 14 billion years. At the heart of that galaxy was a black hole spewing energy equivalent to the output of more than a trillion stars. 

Infrared Image that Sealed the Discovery

The discoverers called this system Porphyrion, after a Greek giant. You can read about this just about anywhere.

I want to write about because for me it ties into the so-called Fermi Paradox. This line of thinking supposedly got started when physicist Enrico Fermi asked, "Where is everybody?" That is, where are all the alien civilizations.

One way to think about the problem is the Drake Equation, which looks like this:

The terms represent the rate of star formation, the fraction of stars that have planets, the fraction of planets where life is possible, the fraction of those planets where life appears, the likelihood that life becomes intelligent, the fraction of civilizations that develop technology we could see from light years away, and the duration of the average such civilization.

I don't see why the obvious rarity of spacefaring civilizations is any kind of paradox; if you simply assume that any one of the middle terms is one in a hundred trillion, the "paradox" disappears.

And one reason I think those terms could be very small is the titanic violence of the universe. The discoverers of Porphyrion think its power is so great that is is rerranging matter across a supercluster of galaxies, and therefore that the uneven distribution of matter in the universe might be partly due to such phenomena. Imagine what would happen to any civilization that got in the way of such a blast. 

These enormous jet systems may be the most striking examples of galactic violence we know of, but lesser violence is everywhere: colliding galaxies, giant black holes, colliding planets, exploding stars. The more I ponder what the galaxy is like, the more I think we are riding a stupendous lucky streak. We got lucky when one of our sun's rocky planets ended up in a zone where water is liquid much of the time, making it possible for life to get going. Life has tenaciously hung on every since, but it has been nearly wiped out several times (or at least complex multi-cellular life has). We have had mega-extinction after mega-extinction, caused by asteroid impacts, volcanism, a planetary ice age, and who knows what else.

And having dodged all of them, we may one day be finished off by another space rock or, if we last long enough, by the expansion of our aging sun.

Our world is a miracle of astonishing improbability, and we should cherish the chance we have been given to thrive.

Strawberry Hill Flower Festival 2024

What a wonderful place.

Links 27 September 2024

Ivory Figurine from Nimrud, Assyria, Showing a Man

with an Oryx, a Monkey, and a Leopard Skin, 7th c. BC

Brief report (in French, but Google translate is good at French) on the archaeology done during the restoration of Notre Dame de Paris.

The fish that uses its "legs" to taste.

Ben Pentreath in Tuscany, amazing photo set, including a visit to Centinale, a famous 17th-century villa.

Painted throne room of the Moche period found at Pañamarca in Peru. Wonderful imagery, but since nobody knows how to interpret Moche art we don't know if the powerful female person who appears several times is a human queen, a goddess, or something else. It's too bad, because given how bizarre Moche art was, I imagine their myths were equally weird.

Stagnation in Britain. Grim.

Polling showing that most of the economic policies Trump and Harris have proposed that are popular with voters are very unpopular with economists. E.g., 79% of non-economists supported eliminating the income tax on tips, but 87% of economists oppose. But everybody agrees on capping the price of insulin.

Sorry, not a lost prince after all.

An IgNobel prize for showing that so-called "blue" areas where many people supposedly live past 100 are created by bad records and pension fraud: "Dr Newman showed that the highest rates of achieving extreme old age are predicted by high poverty, the lack of birth certificates, and fewer 90-year-olds."

Noah Smith asks, "How will you save small midwestern towns without mass immigration?" Says most of the stories he knows about dying towns that came back to life are stories of immigrants arriving in large numbers.

Teeside Psychogeography visits the collection of Pictish carved stones at Meigle. (Part 1, Part 2)

Archaelogists in France find a message in a bottle left by an archaeologist who investigated the same site in the 19th century.

Kevin Drum takes on the notion that modern life leaves us unhappy and spiritually adrift. I would say that it does, but not any more than any other way of life, and less so than any other system you can find around the world today.

Review of several books on the notions of equality and inequality in history.

Bizarre little tale from the edges of human-computer interaction. (Not strictly true, I think, but intriguing.) From the same source, an amusing image set titled "Modern Art Weirdness."

And more, a collection of snippets from the early-twentieth-century critic known as Mr. Jonathan. Lines like, "There seems to be some surprise expressed in surprise-expressing circles that. . . ." and "This musical comedy has all the earmarks of having been produced as a favor to someone. Certainly not as a favor to us."

Poll finds that 50% of likely Harris voters think the economy is getting better while only 1% of likely Trump voters do so; 80% of likely Trump voters, and 75% of conservatives, say it is getting worse. Bewildering.

Having trouble keeping up with the foibles on the younger generation. On the one hand they're a bunch of self-obsessed whiners who won't shut up about their identities, preferably as expressed in some combination of capital letters, but on the other they're ambitious materialists who all major in business, economics or computer science and fight for places in the Investment Club or the Undergraduate Law Review, as argued in a NY Times piece titled "careerism is ruining college."

Matt Yglesias covers the recent upward revision in US economic statistics and writes "we are primed for more good things if we can avoid unneeded weird ideas."

Terrifying review of two books of contemporary Tolkien criticism. Marxism, anti-racism, cognitive maps, etc. People, it's just a story. It's wonderful but both the plot and the universe are full of holes, and it is under no obligation to fit into our contemporary understanding of questions like race and feminism. I have a strong sense that many wonderful stories – The Lord of the Rings, Dune, most of Dickens, the King Arthur cycle, Foundation, Tristan und Isolde – simply dissolve when you scour them too vigorously, leaving only mud in your hands.

Feminists and cats, a history through postcards.

The world's ten coolest neighborhoods, as defined by some hipsters.

New Japanese defense white paper: "The international community is facing its greatest trial since Word War II and entering a new era of crisis." And they are spending to match their fears, especially on ships and missiles.

Great look at 21st-century Russia, from Russian Officers Killed in Ukraine: "Senior Lieutenant Skrivitsky Evgeny Vladimirovich, commander of a company, was murdered in his sleep with another officer by Russian soldiers who were stealing humanitarian aid." 

The Church Paintings of Pickering, Yorkshire

Pickering is a small town in north Yorkshire, England, on the edge of the Moors. It is an old place, documented in the Domesday Book. It has a castle, but these days its most famous site is the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. 

The first church here was built before the year 1000. It was then replaced, and that building was enlarged:

The early Norman Church, which was built around 1140, would have been of simple cruciform layout, with a central tower surrounded by a nave, a chancel and two transepts. Soon, aisles were added to this original structure: the north aisle in about 1150 and the south aisle towards the end of the twelfth century. The present west tower was built in the early part of the thirteenth century, and sometime in the fourteenth century the chancel was widened to cope with the liturgies of the period. A porch was also added, and then, in the fifteenth century, two chantry chapels, either side of the high altar.

Coronation of the Virgin

The church was remodeled again in the 1400s: 

During the 15th Century, the clerestory was constructed and the battlements, or parapets outside were added. The walls of the nave were raised and the roof replaced, and it was at this time, around 1450, that the paintings, which give our church its fame, were first commissioned. They were painted the following decade, as details in the costumes and armour of some of the figures makes clear.

Hell

They were plastered over during the Reformation. Then, in 1852, they were revealed during repairs. Some people loved them, but not the man in charge:

The Vicar at the time, the Rev’d Ponsonby, wanted them re-covered, showing his dislike of them in a letter to the Archbishop of York: ‘As a work of art [they are] fairly ridiculous, would excite feelings of curiosity, and distract the congregation’. He went on to say that ‘the paintings are out of place in a protestant Church, especially in these dangerous times’; he subsequently had them re-covered in a thick yellow wash within a fortnight of the discovery. 

St. Christopher

Not at all clear to me why 1852 was a "dangerous time." 

St. George

Once the fearful vicar was safely dead and buried, the paintings were exposed again. But it was discovered that they had been damaged by the vicar's hasty burying. So they were restored, using as a guide careful drawings made in 1852.

Martyrdom of St. Edmund

Quite a remarkable thing to survive.

The Crisis of Culture

I have recently read two reviews of French intellectual Olivier Roy’s  book The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms: Tyler Cowen, Ian Leslie. Roy argues that culture in the traditional sense of understandings shared at a barely conscious level is dying out, replaced by defined “norms” that we constantly fight over. Cowen: “There has been an ongoing erasure of shared implicit understandings.” Leslie:

Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another - say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. Local cultures, in the sense of finely patterned, shared sensibilities, automatically absorbed and deeply felt, are no match for these bulldozing, ‘deculturating’ forces.

We still need shared norms of behaviour in order to function as societies, however. So in place of implicit culture, he says, we have introduced explicit “norms”: rules of behaviour and speech which aren’t felt or intuited but articulated, coded for, and argued over endlessly. Without instinctive standards for behaviour we have to thrash everything out, from the correct use of pronouns to how to behave on public transport or dress for work. “Culture war” implies some kind of profound division between people, but in truth, suggests Roy, our differences are shallow and petty and all the more bad-tempered for it. Scrape away culture and what you’re left with is negotiation. Everything is politics.

Complex, evolved, layered social identities are being replaced by a series of boxes, with freedom consisting of the right to choose your box at any one time (think about the way that sexual identity is coded into an endlessly multiplying series of letters). The oddly shaped flora and fauna of culture have been reduced a series of “tokens” which we buy and display in order to position ourselves versus others. National cuisines, musical genres, styles of dress: these are all just tokens for us to collect and artfully assemble into a personal brand.

I agree that something like this is happening. Local accents are declining, as are regional variations in dress and idiom.

But I think we commonly exaggerate the degree to which cultural understandings were widely shared; "I didn't get the memo" and similar phrases go back to the nineteenth century. The world has, after all, been changing rapidly for about 300 years now, we have seen multiple major shifts in our expectations of public behavior. The rowdy eighteenth century gave way to the swooning Romantics and then the prim Victorians; the Twenties roared; the Fifties bopped, the hippies turned on and tuned out; etc. We may feel a bit more adrift than some of our ancestors, but it's a difference of degree.

To whatever extent our ancestors were more secure than we are, that was because they interacted only with a limited set of people and put a lot of time and energy into fitting in.

We should also remember the extent to which "culture" was used to exclude people from charmed circles where only people with the right understandings were welcome, and the extent to which the powerful used it to manipulate others. For example women's equality in the workplace has come with a major assault on Mad Men-style office sexuality. Much of American southern culture was straight racism. Elite culture all over the world required the mastery of elaborate lore – dueling etiquette, foreign or dead languages, proficiency in rowing or tennis. A great deal of our most wonderful art was created to put distance between the rich and everyone else, since only they had the time to learn its intricacies.

So I would expect a more democratic and open society to be, in some ways, less diverse and more boring. I understand that this has costs, but I think we can find ways to keep various kinds of culture alive. For one thing, in a world as rich and populous as ours, you only need 1/100 of 1% of the population to sustain a pretty good movement, which can be as arcane as you like. (Furries) 

To the extent that we have replaced implicit understandings with stated norms, we have made the world much more open to everyone not raised in the right sort of family.